The Rural Ideal and Agrarian Realities

A revolution in rural life since the 1940s has produced agribusiness, corporate farms, and situation in which less than five percent of Americans are engaged in farming activities and fewer still work family farms. Richard Hofstadter once observed, "The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city." Today, when few vestiges remain of "the localistic and personalistic frame of reference, which describes farming and country life effectively all the way through the depression years," it is important to remember the influence that an idealized picture of rural life had on earlier generations of American intellectuals. Amidst the profound changes in American society produced by industrialization, urbanization, and corporate capitalism, many thinkers adhered to a vision of simpler times-one of grass-- Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), p. 23. John L.-Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America (DeKalb, Ill., 1976), p. xvi; Shover's book is a poignant analysis of the revolution in rural life since the 1940s. Jean Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, N.J., 1970), examines the nostalgia for simpler times in the thought of nine people, including John Dewey, Charles H. Cooley, Jane Addams, Josiah Royce, and Robert E. Park, who identified personally and professionally with urban life

Agrarian society · Agricultural revolution · Agriculture · Archaeology · Capitalism · Depression (economics) · Economic growth · Economic history · Economics · Family farm · Great Depression · Ideal (ethics) · Industrial Revolution · Industrialisation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rural area · Sociology · Urbanization · American Environmental and Regional History · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Diverse Educational Innovations Studies · History · Law

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